Chapter Three - Abjection into art

Summary

Abjection

One of the most striking features of Sarraute's work is the degree of commitment exhibited in it to the indistinction it portrays. It is not just the familial embrace of Vous les entendez? or ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’ which the characters yearn for, since even where embrace is lived as threat or contamination it is nevertheless ardently sought. The narrator's discovery of the liquid subjectivity of Le Vieux and his daughter in Portrait d'un inconnu is, for all its contamination, the gratifying outcome of the obsessive pressure he exerts on the surface of these figures in the hopes, precisely, that they will yield the sticky substance of their inner being:

Moi, je ne sais […] que tourner autour d'eux, cherchant avec un acharnement maniaque la fente, la petite fissure, ce point fragile comme la fontanelle des petits enfants, où il me semble que quelque chose, comme une pulsation à peine perceptible, affleure et bat doucement. Là je m'accroche, j'appuie. (PI, pp. 66–7)

[[…] all I am able to do is hover about them and try with fanatical eagerness find the crack, the tiny crevice, the vulnerable spot, as delicate as a baby's fontanelle, where I seem to see something that resembles a barely perceptible pulsation, swell and begin to throb gently. I cling onto it and press. (pp. 68–9)]

The reward for this maniacal attention is the stream of strange liquid which bursts out of them and engulfs him.